No one expects a man to make a chair without first learning how, but there is a popular impression that the poet is born, not made, and that his verses burst from his overflowing heart of themselves. As a matter of fact, the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker. His heart may overflow with high thoughts and sparkling fancies, but if he cannot convey them to his reader by means of the written word he has no claim to be considered a poet.

—Amy Lowell

As I was checking proofs of The Conversation yesterday, I came across the above quotation, which opens my chapter on details in poetry. To me, Lowell's statement seems simple, sensible, and eloquent. However, I've lately found myself having to defend this point of view, which another poet has more or less summed up as not only self-deceiving and reductive but even coarse. Naturally, every poet is different, and we all have individual perceptions about writing, revision, and finished work. But when I came across Lowell's remark yesterday, and then read it again and again in search of a flaw, I still could not find anything to dispute. How can it not be true?

In one of his notebooks, Frost wrote, "In the briefest the slenderest lyric poem the sentences must spring away from each other and talk to each other if my interest is to be held." But of course inspiration, ideas, conceptions, triggers: these are all vital elements in the making of art. Rukeyser addresses that complexity in The Life of Poetry:

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form. That this form has to do with the relationship of sounds, rhythms, imaginative beliefs does not isolate the process from any other creation. A total imaginative response is involved, and the first gestures of offering--even if the offering is never completed, and indeed if the poem falls short. If it does, it has fallen in the conception, for the conception and the execution are identified here--whatever is conceived is made, is written. 

Essentials are here, as in mathematical or musical creation. . . . Only the essential is true; Joseph Conrad, in a letter of advice, drives this home by recommending deletions, explaining that these words are "not essential and therefore not true to the fact."

And so we come down to words again. The essentials. Lowell's explanation is artisanal; Frost's is athletic, Rukeyser's is mystical. But all lead me to the same place: the precision of language. "[My] heart may overflow with high thoughts and sparkling fancies, but if [I] cannot convey them to [my] reader by means of the written word [I have] no claim to be considered a poet."